Google Search Liaison Danny Sullivan posted today that the company had “decided to retire” the feature that let you view a previous version of a webpage right from search results, as reported by Search Engine Land.
Adding “cache:” to a URL (as in cache:theverge.com) still works, but soon, it won’t. Sullivan said he hopes Google will replace the cached option with Internet Archive links, but offered “no promises.”
Post launched in 2022 as a way to read ad-free news articles and paywalled content with a points-based system. But now, it’s rolling out a number of improvements, including native comments you can leave on feeds, repost, and tag people in.
There’s also an update to make navigating between posts and comment threads smoother, along with a new real-time notification system that will keep you “up to date with accurate comment counts, activity stream updates, and much more.” Post is also working on building achievements, status badges, and rewards for users.
[Post News]
The dream of the early internet is alive in PI.FYI, a new app spun out from Perfectly Imperfect.
With a little casual hexadecimal memorization and pattern recognition skill, you can become a QR code-reading machine — no pesky computer required!
The black and white boxes represent binary 1s and 0s, respectively, and it’s read in a zig-zagging pattern up and down the code, starting from the bottom-right corner. Check out this handy guide to learn how today!
The unsubscribe option now shows up when hovering over emails in Gmail on the web, rather than after opening them. Meanwhile, you’ll find the option at the top of opened emails in the iOS and Android Gmail app, rather than tucked away behind the three dots menu. Hooray, discoverability!
Also, reporting spam doesn’t offer a “Report spam & unsubscribe” option anymore, and instead invites you to simply “Unsubscribe” to legitimate senders.
Google is adding AI image generation to Bard tomorrow, according to developer Dylan Roussel, who shared a screenshot of a changelog dated for tomorrow.
Roussel says it will use Imagen, Google’s text-to-image model, shown in a video of an earlier iteration.
GameStop will shut down the NFT marketplace on February 2nd “due to the continuing regulatory uncertainty of the crypto space,” reported by Decrypt yesterday.
That’s the same reason the company offered for shutting down its crypto wallet last year. The marketplace opened just a year and a half ago. The SEC was keenly interested in crypto throughout 2023, and took its first unregistered security enforcement against an NFT project in August.
Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg suggested Tumblr’s unloved Live service wasn’t long for this world last year, and it’s now shutting down January 24th. Users can transfer any in-app currency they bought to the video chat service MeetMe, which uses the same underlying tech. The Tumblr userbase, unsurprisingly, seems pleased.
[Help Center]
The API went down on December 28th, preventing third-party apps like iA Writer or Ulysses from publishing to Medium.
The site’s API status page was updated today, at 12:41PM ET, to say it’s active again.
Update January 9th, 2024, 12:47PM ET: Medium’s site says its API is back up.
[MediumSupport]
As announced last month, today 1 percent of Chrome users will see a notification when they open Chrome on desktop or Android if selected to try Google’s new Tracking Protection feature. The Wall Street Journal has a writeup on what it could mean for advertisers, with some thinking Google’s moving too fast, some relieved it’s finally happening, and everyone waiting to see how it goes.
